Wheels for motor vehicles are equipped with transmitters that broadcast information about the status of the wheels, including the tire identity and location, whether the wheel is rolling or stationary, temperature and tire pressure. Vehicles on which such wheels are mounted include tire monitoring systems that receive and process the information transmitted by the wheels. Information is exchanged between wheels and vehicles by means of wireless transmissions in accordance with communication protocols.
It has been proposed to use tire monitoring systems to detect when a spare wheel has been mounted as an active or rolling wheel. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,030,745. Such systems rely on the use of a unique wheel identification number. When a spare wheel is removed from a storage location and installed as a rolling wheel (such as to fix a flat tire), the system detects rolling movement in the spare wheel (which is uniquely identified by its ID number). Thus it is determined that the spare wheel has been placed onto a rolling wheel location.
A drawback to these proposed systems is that they rely on an association of a unique ID number with a specific wheel and wheel position. This association of unique ID numbers with wheel positions takes place during a learning mode, which may require manual intervention or additional electronics.